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MAME v181

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Happy new year from the MAME team! To help you celebrate, weíre unwrapping an extra-special release this month, with enough improvements to put anyone in a good mood. The exciting news thatís got people talking is that protected microcontrollers (MCUs) from a number of games have been read out and hooked up in MAME. This gives real, emulated sound in Toaplanís Vimana, Fire Shark (also known as Same! Same! Same!) and Teki Paki, proper emulation of Tokio/Scramble Formation, M-chip emulation for Taito Extermination, Dr Toppel and Plump Pop, MCU emulation for Sega Altered Beast and Golden Axe, and partial sound in World Beach Volley. Thereís more coming on this front, so stay tuned for upcoming releases!

MAME 0.181 also marks the debut of Votrax SC-01 emulation in MAME, based on reverse-engineering die photographs. The digital section should be pretty much perfect, although there are still some issues in the analog section (plosives donít sound quite right). Overall, itís a huge improvement in Votrax speech synthesis emulation, and a great leap forward in our understanding of how the hardware works. It also means speech samples are no longer required for a number of games.

Building on the ARM improvements in last monthís release, we now have working floppy drives and sound in the Acorn Archimedes driver, and default NVRAM images for the US Aristocrat Mark 5 games. This greatly increases the amount of RISC OS software you can try out, improves the gameplay experience in the Archimedes-based arcade games, and allows you to play the Aristocrat gamblers without having to make your way through the setup process first.

MAMEís discrete netlist emulation library has been expanded substantially in this release, including some new classes of devices like ROMs, and many newly supported logic chips. This will make it substantially easier to emulate arcade games which used discrete TTL logic, and as a test of this new functionality, the TTL video board from the Hazeltine 1500 intelligent terminal is now emulated using the netlist system. Thereís ongoing work in this area involving multiple developers, so look out for more exciting updates in this space.

Weíve fixed some fairly significant bugs, including one preventing the debugger from working on Linux or Mac with drivers that use a dynamic recompiler core, and one that could cause MAME to crash when using BDF fonts. The internal UI should be more efficient if youíre using icons now, and issues with spurious key repeats should be reduced. The Beezer driver has been rewritten and should be improved overall.

There are quite a few newly dumped arcade games in this release, including Eeekk!, Simpson Junior (a Korean bootleg of J. J. Squawkers), Power Flipper Pinball Shooting (an updated version of Grand Cross), a version of Momoko 120% with English text, Miss World 2002 (an adult Qix game), and alternate versions of The NewZealand Story, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Space Dungeon, Flicky and Turbo Force. The Apricot PC and Xi are now working, further increasing MAMEís coverage of DOS-based computers that arenít IBM-compatible. You can also play with the COP44L version of Entex Space Invader, and Mattel Funtronics Jacks and Red Light Green Light.

There are far too many improvements to list here, including lots of fixes for graphics and flip screen issues, but you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or grab the source or Windows binaries from the download page and start playing.

-zwackery: Removed Artificial Artist PAL, now included in the csd device. [Dirk Best]

-zwackery: Corrected ROM labels and locations. [Dirk Best]

-mcr68: Move zwackery to its own driver (doesn't have much in common with other games in driver). [Dirk Best]
* Also cleaned up implementation, made spriteram 8-bit, added some hardware info and added button descriptions.

-micro20: Added some features needed for the selftest, but couldn't hook up the missing parts so haven't verified that the self test
actually can run through now. [Joakim Larsson Edstrom]
* H4 is now cleared in reset and asserted by software down the line
* By calling the update_tin method the device now support external clock for the timer
* Clock can also be polled at port C bit #2
* The test expects something to pulse at port B and then a clock at TIN (port C pin #2 alternate function)

-68230: Added initial support for timer interrupts and embryonic support for port interrupts. [Joakim Larsson Edstrom]

-Fixed a regression FIFO bug and a bug in the handling of Special Interrupts. [Joakim Larsson Edstrom]

-Fixed name to a better guess for MCU name for plump pop, and marked as bad pending verification that it is the same MCU which
drtoppel and extermination use. [Lord Nightmare]

-tnzs.cpp: Updated a slew of comments, added most missing PALs as undumped, fixed some ROM labels, added a chart of the different
Taito/Seta PCBs covered by tnzs.cpp and the differences between each. [Lord Nightmare]

-toaplan1.cpp: Fixed DSWB reading (seems to be inverted when read by the MCU), also reverted changes to TJUMP jumper settings and
inverted those as well on read, though it still seems to be a bit screwy for some settings. [Lord Nightmare]

-toaplan1.cpp: vimana regions should work fine now. [Lord Nightmare]

-Don't use mem_mask as ATA doesn't have an equivalent mechanism for byte accesses and it could mask out data that real hardware
would keep, instead fix issue with 68000 byte writes to sector count by only taking the bottom 8 bits from the bus. [smf]

-Update disassembly if IP or CS are changed in the debugger; also update IP and CS when PC or CURPC changes. [smf]

-Added preliminary sound to Dulmont Magnum. [smf]

-Added halt to debugger state, so you can break out of a hlt instruction. [smf]

-HACK: return 0xffff for the current program counter while fetching the vector as the segag80r protection currently relies on it.
Reduce the number of extraneous reads that the segag80r protection performs. [smf]

-system16.cpp: Sound improvements for some bootlegs: [AJR]
* Hooked up MSM5205/74LS157 on the 2xYM2203 bootlegs, all of which now have some imperfect samples playback.
* Corrected goldnaxeb2 configuration to use the aforementioned sound system.

-First stab at cleaning up the DOS boot and installation disk mess on the PC & AT softlists: [Justin Kerk]
* Removed 100% duplicate sets.
* Moved sets from ibm5170 to ibm5150 if they work on PC-class hardware (later DOS versions are needed for some games).
* Removed the ibm5160 softlist, it only contained one duplicate set.
* Added clone relationships.
* More consistency in set naming and metadata.